Hey guys, this is Aaron. Today I want to take a look at three mini extensions.
These are simple utilities that run off of a single button click little to no
setup or preferences or anything like that. The first one I'd look at is Weld
What Weld does it takes a bunch of separate pieces like this line here, you
can see I have a bunch of arcs and lines together creating a path. I do this a lot
if I'm going to do a Follow-Me or something like that. It'll take all these
pieces and with a button click right here on the Weld icon if I click that
it's going to turn it into a single line. If I pick on it you can see up in Entity Info
it tells me it is now a curve. So that's all one piece I can move it
together, don't have to worry about pieces getting disconnected if I move or
something like that. This is also useful with circles. Now when circles are first
drawn they're drawn as a single line that's filled in with the surface, but
what can happen because of intersecting geometry or because of I might explode
the curve I end up with a bunch of segments. Not a big deal. With Weld what I
can do is select all these lines and the surface click on Weld and I'm back to a
single circle again. Again it does call the curve it's not a circle at this
point but it is put together so if I do something like push pull it I will get a
nice smooth surface rather than a bunch of separate pieces that the broken
segments would have created. The next utility I only look at is called Pushline.
Pushline a great utility it creates a push-pull like command for
lines, just like the name says. So if I go into Pushline, Pushline's available
through the Extension Warehouse from Dennis B. I can click on a line and pull
it and what it will give me is a surface so it's a great utility especially if
you start with single dimension something like that that you need to end
up pulling into a surface something like like like this like I'm doing here it's
a great way to do it. It works just like push-pull but works with lines. An
excellent tool. Real quick and easy to use. There's there is no learning curve
and a nice mini extension. Worth checking out. The last one I
want to look at is Solar North. Solar North is available from the SketchUp
Team, also in the Extension Warehouse. I'll put links to all of these
extensions in the description below. Solar North is real simple. When you
first model something in SketchUp the assumption is that the green line is
running north so when I look at something like my shadow settings as I'm
moving these around that is all based on the Green Line running to the north. Of
course this changes a little bit if I geo locate that sort of thing, but
generally speaking if I just start modeling it's looking up here as being
north. Now Solar North does a couple things. There's actually more than one button
but it's pretty much that simple. First thing is if I turn on this toggle
it will show me where North is for this model right now. So you can see it's
actually just off axis the other thing I can do is I can actually come in here
and I can click to change north so this will let me click on a point in this
case I chose the origin and drag back and forth to change which direction is
north this is great if you have if you get a model from someone else and you
don't know which direction is north in their model toggling the orange line I
will show you where North is or if you're modeling something and you've
modeled incorrect, don't want to go rotate, don't want to do that sort of thing, you
can actually just come in here and pivot north rather than having to change your
model or reset anything. So that's Solar North from the SketchUp team. Again we
looked at Weld, Pushline, and Solar North all available on the Extension Warehouse.
Those are our three mini extensions. Thank you!